Page:Mankind in the Making (Wells).djvu/409

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
The Man's Own Share
393

different ways and positions. And coming to our help, to reinforce us, to supersede us, to take the growing task out of our hands, will come youth, will come our sons and daughters, and those for whom we have written our books, for whom we have taught in our schools, for whom we have founded and ordered libraries, toiled in laboratories and in waste places and strange lands; for whom we have made saner and cleaner homes, and saner and cleaner social and political arrangements, foregoing a hundred comfortable acquiescences that these things might be done. Youth will come to take over the work from us, and go on with it in a bolder and ampler manner than we in these limited days dare to attempt.

Assuredly youth will come to us, if this is indeed to be the dawn of a new time. Without the high resolve of youth, without the constant accession of youth, without recuperative power, no sustained forward movement is possible in the world. It is to youth, therefore, that this book is finally addressed, to the adolescents, to the students, to those who are yet in the schools and who will presently come to read it, to those who being still plastic can understand the infinite plasticity of the world. It is those who are yet unmade who must become the makers. After thirty there are few conversions and fewer fine beginnings; men and women go on in the path they have marked out for themselves. Their imaginations have become firm and rigid, even if they have